


Saint Kate the Dragonslayer

by JustinianAugustus



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, One Shot, POV First Person, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 09:59:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24349138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustinianAugustus/pseuds/JustinianAugustus
Summary: Max visits her old friend Kate. Aimless fluff ensues.
Relationships: Maxine "Max" Caulfield/Kate Marsh
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	Saint Kate the Dragonslayer

Kate took her time in answering my knock, but considering the temperature I couldn’t blame her for holding the fort somewhere deep inside her house. When she opened the door wearing nothing by sweatpants and a plain old shirt my hopes of complimenting her on something were dashed.

“Hey! Crazy storm out there.”

“Yeah.”

Not much substance to any of it. A greeting as flimsy as the aluminum screen I was now propping back with my ankle. We stared for another second, both of us daring the other to say something else, but in the end I just stepped forward and left the snow to its busywork.

I noticed her trying to tidy her hair with her fingers as I escorted myself into the kitchen.

“Want some tea?” she offered, just to fill the space.

“No, I’m kinda tired. And I kinda _want_ to be tired.”

She searched me with a look of blank half-registry.

“On account of the snow and all. It’s so grey. Seems fitting to be drowsy.”

Kate nodded. Hospitality obligations forced her to keep the conversation flowing.  
“I didn’t want to get up at all this morning. I mean I _didn’t_... I didn’t get up till like an hour ago.”

Kate was now stirring two of her fingers through a jar of tea leaves, though neither of us seemed to have any interest in them. She looked like that pretty trainee waitress they always have in diners, waiting for me to place an order.

“Did you already make your bed? We could just go cry there.”

She reacted with some kind of combination sigh-snicker, I don’t quite know what to call it. But it looked as if my order went through to the kitchen.

“Totally. Today is a day for cuddling.”

And cuddling, of course, is a dish best served warm.

It was all a bit strange, running off to her room with hardly an introduction — hardly a reference to the time which had passed since I last saw her. But maybe there was something to it.

Her room was slightly stuffy, because she had one of those big sit-down heaters running on a chair by her closet. The window blinds were thrown down as well, so you could only hear the billowing snow gusts outside. I jumped onto the most ruffled patch of her sheets.

“How are your grandparents doing?” I spitballed.

“Well, my grandpa’s dead.”

Christ, what a way to start things off. I only brought it up because I knew some of her relatives were royalty in their respective fields. Her grandfather had been a top surgeon in his home state and the whole family was very proud of it. It made me feel less guilty about our whole past, in which I was always the ‘lucky one’, the one who got away from Jefferson unscathed.

“Oh my god, how? I didn’t…”

“I’m sorry, yeah, I didn’t tell you. I didn’t really tell anybody, it just felt better to deal with it privately, because of how weird it all was.”

She stretched her mouth a few times before starting.

“He told me that the reason he became a surgeon was because as a kid he hated hospitals, and was really afraid of everything there, not knowing what’s going on and all the technical stuff… he decided that he needed to always be on the other side, always be the one giving out the diagnoses and incisions instead of receiving them. I think he thought it would make him immune to any medical problems.” She breathed a pseudo-sigh again. “Didn’t save him from a fatal stroke.”

“Damn.”

There were a thousand questions I could ask, though nothing seemed appropriate at the moment. What did Kate make of all that? Was it bravery or hubris or what?

“You’ve been through worse. I can’t imagine how it felt for you, with all those people you knew in the bay,” she replied.

“I had Chloe. It wasn’t as bad.”

I scratched my forehead, ready to give a solemn eulogy for Arcadia Bay, but my attention was hijacked by the faint sound of buzzing.

“Oh no, is that a fly?” Kate asked, her eyes moonlike and face stricken. “It’s freezing and the windows are closed, I don’t know how one could get in. Is it outside?”

She seemed too timid to even turn over and look, so I pulled myself into a sitting position and scanned the room. The sound continued in short bursts.

“It sounds like it’s up behind the blinds…”

“Now it sounds more like it’s coming from there,” Kate observed with a finger pointed at the lighting fixture above us.

“Wait no, now it’s definitely moving around the room. I can’t see it.”

As the sound zoomed louder than ever right by us, Kate attempted to dive under the covers and hide beneath her pillow in the same move, accomplishing only an amusing spasm.  
And there, a blip in the air, doing laps past the bedposts.

“I see it!”

“Is it a fly or a bee?” Kate moaned.

“It’s small, it’s a fly.”

“Are you sure? It could be one of those small bees, those ones with the kinda dull colors.”

“No, no it’s definitely a fly.”

I rolled off the bed and scrambled to a paperback book on the floor, wielding it wildly.

“Agh, why’d you leave me?” Kate cried, scrambling over beside me. We stood stock still and waited for the pest to come towards us again, at which point I took a huge swing at it. The fly managed to edge right around the arc of the pages, probably buffeted by the air.

“How did I miss that?”

“Let me see it,” Kate offered.

I handed the weapon to her, which prompted a furious dance of uncalculated swinging about the room. I doubt she had any idea where the insect even was, but she continued to run back and forth swinging in every direction. It was like watching a madman fight throngs of imagined assailants.  
When she realized her antics were rather counterproductive, she anchored herself next to me again, out of breath. We could still hear the creature’s frantic buzzing, but had no visual. Suddenly it swung around the corner in a dive bomb, sending us into a hasty retreat out the doorway. We would have made any WWI veteran proud with our dignified scamper.

“I’m just gonna sit out here until it stops and then I can get it,” Kate stated, slightly winded. I was standing behind her and felt it prudent to hug her, wreathing her stomach with my arms and feeling the soft rise and fall as she breathed. For the moment, Kate was my protector.  
As the buzzing came to a halt, she peaked around the room and I broke off my connection. Without a word, she advanced on the fly — now alighted upon a short platform running along the walls — and raised the book. Instead of attempting to swing downwards, she threw the whole book out of her hands in a flurry of yellowed pages, straight onto the fly’s location. A streak of faint pink was left where the fly had been tending itself.

“Okay, ew. But at least it’s dead.”

For the second time, I wrapped my hands around her and pressed her body against mine, resting my head on her shoulder so our cheeks touched.  
“You killed the dragon.”


End file.
